MayMetMo 2020 #3: Tears for Childlike

He sat in the dark reading aloud the words he had written long ago, in another life, another world.  The world before had moved on, and taken everything along with it.   Everything that had been a staple of his life, had changed.  Though he had few mental problems, who didn’t nowadays, he felt as though he had dementia, remembering things one way only to see them all so vastly different when his eyes settled upon them again.  Searching for meaning in old letters, poems, silly and trivial writings, day to day rants and messages between long lost friends.  Between the edges of the pen strokes and punctuation marks, the old world begins to flow in.  Chapped cracked lips whisper over the old tongue sounding out the feelings derived and the old emotions trapped within the page come speeding out like trains from dark tunnels into the heaving chest of the new person who wrote the old words.    The young self floods the old body with all of its senses and childlike wonder, and in the vacant darkness of despair,  hope spills like from the eyes of the newly envigorated man, tears of the young, on the face of the old.